Sažetak
The nutrition of athletes has been of interest to scientists for decades and since the origins of sports competitions the questions about what to eat and what to drink in order to improve performance have been raised. Today there are scientific proofs that an adequate dietary habits influences in a large extent to an athlete's health, body composition, and energetic pathways during the activity as well as during the competition or recovery. Athletes should be well informed about the food groups, caloric intake, and daily meal schedule. As the previous investigations showed, the athletes obtain most of their knowledge about nutrition from their coaches, especially physical conditioning coaches (Burns et al, 2004 ; Jacobsson et al., 2001). The major aim of this study would be determination of the level of knowledge about nutrition and dietary habits, especially healthy way of eating in tennis coaches. Also the aim is to establish the relations between knowledge about nutrition and dietary habits. The sample consisted of 49 tennis coaches from Croatia. The knowledge about the sports nutrition and their dietary habits were tested by means of questionnaires. The questionnaires were constructed based on the results of previous studies conducted at the Faculty of Kinesiology (Mišigoj-Duraković et al, 2005) and the results from international studies (Conkle and Tischler, 1992 ; Parmenter and Wardle, 1999 ; Turconi et al., 2003 ; Paugh, 2005.). The questionnaire that provided information about knowledge in sports nutrition consisted of items determining the general knowledge about nutrition, nutritional ingredients needed for providing adequate energy level in sports, items about supplements, meal schedule before training and competition and recovery, and of items testing the knowledge about importance of liquids, dehydration and rehydration during and after training and competition. Dietary habits of the subjects were determined by items regarding the number of meals per day, skipping the meals, intake of particular food subgroups based on the food pyramid, liquid intake and vitamin and mineral supplements intake, specially those used usually in sports. Surveys were anonymous and the data obtained were analysed by statistical software STATISTICA for WINDOWS. The correlations between nutritional knowledge and dietary habits were tested by Pearson correlation coefficient. According to the results obtained we concluded that the level of knowledge about nutrition and dietary habits of tennis coaches are inadequate and that the source of information for nutritional facts that they use are not always scientifically justified. Positive relationship was found between dietary habits and nutritional knowledge. Good level of knowledge potentially could indicate good dietary habits.